PM/AM: How Facebook Is Toying With Your Mind This Time

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Welcome to PM/AM, Popular Mechanics' morning briefing on the top science and tech stories for today.

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Just when you thought Facebook couldn't get creepier: Not only does The Social Network own our nostalgia, it is also manipulating our emotions. In a new study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers tested whether they could affect nearly 700,000 Facebook user's moods by more positive or negative content in the users' timelines. Turns out, the researchers were right! And they intentionally made thousands of guinea pigs people sadder. Whoops.

An analysis by Slate raises many interesting legal and ethical questions about the study—for example, when scientists want to perform experiments on people, they need informed consent from their test subjects. Usually informed consent is some sort of statement that lists all the things that could go badly in an experiment. Like having one's emotions toyed with.

The researchers believed they had informed consent because Facebook's data use policy states the following:

"For example, in addition to helping people see and find things that you do and share, we may use the information we receive about you ... for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement."

I'm curious to find out who actually reads these policies. Certainly not Kyle Broflovski.

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